@AIMind_Ai: 6 dead office PCs at $50 each run a Kubernetes cluster that AWS would bill $10,000 a year for. Most home labs die befor…
Summary
Building a Kubernetes cluster with six used office PCs for $300 provides significant cost savings compared to AWS cloud services, encouraging practical home lab setups with readily available hardware.
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6 dead office PCs at $50 each run a Kubernetes cluster that AWS would bill $10,000 a year for.
Most home labs die before they boot.
Someone specs a Xeon. Prices 128GB of RAM. Opens 40 tabs. Buys nothing.
The build that actually runs is uglier than that.
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini. Corporate castoffs, dumped on eBay by the pallet every time an office refreshes. $50 a unit, sold stripped. 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe put each one back to work.
35W chips. All 6 idle under 100W.
k3s on top, not kubeadm. 1 binary, 512MB of RAM. node1 starts the cluster. node2 and node3 join as servers. That is 3 etcd members, so losing one kills nothing.
6 nodes. 17 namespaces. 173 pods. CPU idling at 4.6%.
The same cluster on EKS: 6 t3.xlarge at $121 a month, plus $73 for the control plane. $9,636 a year.
$300 once.
And it did not start there. The first server was a retired gaming PC headed for a closet.
The right first machine is the one already collecting dust.
Stop planning the rack. Start having fun.
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